MY GLAMOROUS MOTHER

 

My mother is the most glamorous woman in the cancer ward; her star quality is startling. The nurses gather around gaping, mouths open, unashamedly ignoring the other women. One-nurse gushes, "Look at those cheekbones! You must have been somebody!" The other highly trained professionals nod in agreement.

                 My mother absorbs the attention as her right; she doesn't care what happens to the other rich ladies with cancer. She doesn't even care that she's already spoken of in the past tense-- as an actress perhaps who had made a splash before getting married. No, all that matters to my glamorous mother is the attention. She sits up a little straighter, she smiles a little wider, and she licks her paw before smoothing back her turban.

                 We're sitting in a private doctor's office in Manhattan surrounded by women in recliners. Aside from the IV's full of chemicals we could be at a spa. One woman, with shopping bags from Barney's, in fact, calls this, "The full day treatment." Another woman just sent her maid across the street for shrimp, "And make sure they're jumbo this time." I expect to see a manicurist pop in any second.

                 The women chat about the price of wigs; "Insane!" says one, whose new hair hangs down her back as Cher's did in the mid-seventies. Rosie O'Donnell is on TV, eating a twinkie. These women, accustomed to comfort, recline, chemicals drip discretely into their veins. I sit in a spare recliner and flip through magazines, not making any connection between the chair and my eventual fate. (I don't know my eventual fate, no one does, but I'm not superior to anyone else in the denial department, I just wanted you to know that.)

                 "No," my mother answers, glowing, "I was just a mother." She says it as if she actually liked being a mother; this had never been my impression. What I remember was a thin, glamorous mother zip, zip, zipping around on diet pills. Oh, the fun we had!

                 Finally the poison drip is finished and we have a short chat with the doctor, the only man that we've seen all day. He asks how she feels. "Just fabulous." I would like more information, and good luck to me, with a glamorous mother you never get more information.

                 "Will he (meaning me) be coming with you again?" the doctor asks.

                 "No." My mother answers quickly. "He won't."

                 "There you have it." I say to the doctor, "No."

                 I would like my glamorous, thin, cancerous mother to open her fucking mouth and say something coherent. I'd like her to say, " No, I don't want him to come again because he's a writer. He's probably going to write about this and who needs that?" Or she could say, "He's not coming again because I've never really liked him. He gets on my nerves."

                 But she says nothing; this, of course, is her right and her privilege; pretty girls are allowed, encouraged even, to be withholding.

                 The doctor asks, "Is there anything you want to say about your treatment?"

                 My mother pauses, looks down and squeaks out a voice I have never heard before. Before I tell you what she says, you should know my life in observation started with this woman—it had to—she was so vacant. I can tell microclimates of her emotions based on nothing more than the click of a heel against a floor, by an eyebrow raised for a split second, and yet-- I had never heard this voice before. She sounds small, three perhaps four, and lost. She was telling a police officer in a greatcoat, "I don't want to die."

                 The doctor says nothing, he leans back in his recliner and says, finally, " Well, no." The pause, the leaning back, these can't be good signs. Good manners stop us from saying anything of importance. We thank him and leave.

                 I wrap her up in her mink coat, it's enormous and getting larger by the minute; and I trundle her out through several sets of heavy doors. My stepfather is idling in front in the Mercedes, the larger one; it's her car. They have many things in common she and he. I knew they were serious about each other when they started having plastic surgery together, their eyes: his upper, hers lower. They also have cars in common, both Mercedes: his small and sporty, hers stately-- with doors that close with a vault-like solemnity. Now this is a canny bit of marketing. Mercedes Benz, maker of the gas showers, supplier to the Third Reich, has its product plunked down in front of most of the Jewish homes in our neighborhood; there's a genius in that.

                 My mother is covered in love tokens from Cartier (panthers climb her lapel), but those French people were probably all in the Resistance.

                 Her bag is sent directly from the kind people at Fendi (well, they did seem awfully happy to be liberated—all that jumping up and down.) My mother couldn't care less about any of that; she carries around what she sees in magazines.

                 My earliest memory is the Gucci doctors bag at the crook of her arm. It was the seventies and she had a Dorothy Hamill severe, wedge like flip. Later, when I was in high school she had longer, curled hair, a halo of henna and the horsey feed bag of a bag slung on her back. Sparkly Judith Lieber clutches (but, thank god, never in the shape of an animal) were for evening. Then she got into the Gangster Moll period because her life had been so hard. She read Jackie Collins for spiritual advice. So, I have no idea what she wore for most of the nineties, but I'm sure it was lovely, just lovely. Now she carries an ugly Fendi tote, and, of course, she's bald.

                 I've been home for a month now. At first she looked as if she'd had the flu, tired but not seriously sick. Now, it's more than that. You have to remember, when your mother is as dedicated to youth as mine is-- you never see signs of aging. I'd come home from college and she would look me over for signs of aging, which would reflect badly upon her. A few hours later I would counter strike.

                 "Mom," I'd say, "Your eyes, again?"

                 "You're insane." She'd block.

                 " Mom, they turn up at the edges, like Barbara Eden's." She'd examine her nails, so I would add.

                 "Did you hear that Dad had his neck done?"

                 "No, I hadn't " Perking up, "What else?"

                 I am thirty-three, my parents fifty-four but in a science fiction kind of way. I get older; they got re-modeled; the first sign of aging was this cancer which will kill her.

Observations, After

©2008 Sorrowland Press and all respective artists within.

CONTINUE